^The APQC Blog

Your brain is the most powerful knowledge management tool you have. Yet you may know more about designing a community of practice than capitalizing on how your brain works. Your brain is worth understanding if you are into KM: it’s the original information processer; the unrivaled content curator; and the source of inspiration, motivation, and collaboration.

Around here, lots of process conversations start with, “Hey! Got a minute?”

When someone around APQC comes to me with one of those, I immediately cringe a little bit – rarely is the request something that I can actually handle in “a minute”. This is especially true if the request has something to do with how my department (Open Standards Benchmarking^®) works with other departments (like marketing, research, finance, HR, etc.). But I have a secret weapon in my arsenal: MosaiQ™.

There’s no need to be intimidated by the seemingly endless complexities of knowledge management (KM). Undoubtedly, APQC has published countless resources on the subject so it’s understandable if you may feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of content available.

I was thinking about the relationship between access to knowledge and quality of learning.  It started when I was working on a project in which I needed to embed a video file into a content piece. My mind went completely blank and I had to rummage through my organization’s SharePoint site and Wikis to figure out the process to embed a simple video. Please feel free to laugh— sometimes I am technically challenged or a “complete Luddite” according to my teenage son.

Cognitive computing will be as disruptive to organizations in the next decade as social media was in the last. Maybe more. 

Cognitive computing, along with its engines machine learning and predictive analytics, will radically transform the way we interact with content and each other in our digital lives. Content management, collaboration and the entire search experience will change and become more personal, more customized, and more automated.

Margaret Heffernan coaches CEOs on how to make work more meaningful and fun. On a recent TED Radio Hour, The Meaning of Work, she discussed the productivity of groups by describing an experiment conducted by evolutionary biologist William Mure that involved chickens.  

Back in 2014, I attended the Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) conference and we talked a lot about the teachable moment. If this term is new for some of you, the “teachable moment” refers to a time when an individual is most receptive to learning something. It includes the idea that the thing learned at that moment, when the individual needs to know or use it, is likely to be deeply impressed on the person.

Big data and Internet of Things (IoT) are changing how organizations are operating their supply chains. Organizations are learning new ways to collect, share, and use data to understand their customers and make better strategic business decisions.

It is easy to think of cybersecurity as the domain of IT, but with the number of electronic and networked devices needed for day-to-day business tasks multiplying, that is an old way of thinking. Cybersecurity is everyone’s job and a failure to prepare hurts the organization’s bottom line. CFO’s can play an important role in this by taking on a stronger leadership role in preparing for cyber incidents.

We’re already in the second month of 2016. Budgets and strategies are set for the year, which means organizations have set the tone for how the next few months will play out. What do supply chain management professionals think about the direction their organizations are taking in 2016? APQC is conducting a survey on this topic, and the early results are interesting.